Sherpa Sites makes it easy to launch your new site and use it right out of the box (even though there’s no box!). But most of us want to make our sites our own. We’ve done our best to give you the ability to customize your site with functionality and design that reflects your personal brand and preferences.
Appearance
You can control numerous elements of your site’s appearance including the following:
- Domain - using our domain mapping tool you can set a custom domain for your site (ex. http://www.mysite.com)
- Theme – choose from our standard themes or upgrade to premium themes with multiple color styles, all built on the Genesis Framework
- Custom menus – many of our themes support multiple navigation menus which you can build using the custom menu tool
- Background – choose any image for your background that conveys your sense of style and brand
- Header – you can use text or a logo image in your header and even activate widgets if you like
Plugins
We have automatically activated a collection of critical plugins for all Sherpa Sites to allow you site to perform at an optimal level. We’ve also preloaded the most popular plugins which you can activate for additional functionality including:
- Akismet – provides spam protection for your blog
- Gravity Forms - very powerful form creation tool that can be used anywhere on your site
- MarketPress – a fully integrated ecommerce solution that supports PayPal (Pro Level only)
- Disqus Comment System – powers a very powerful comment management system to help foster engagement on your site
- Thinglink – allows you to create an interactive hotspot inside an image, from a thing (an object, a person, or a place) to a link (a shop, a blog post, or anywhere you like)
- Popup - allows you to display a fancy popup (powered as a popover!) to visitors
- Easy Shortcode Buttons - using shortcodes you can have CSS3 buttons anywhere on your site
- FollowMe - this plugin allows you to add a Twitter follow me badge on your blog
- Jetpack - enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users
- Membership Premium - a membership system plugin that will allow you to create membership levels on your site and restrict access to just paying members
- Polldaddy Polls & Ratings - create and manage Polldaddy polls and ratings on your site
- Revision Control - allows finer control over the number of revisions stored on a global & per-type/page basis to reduce the storage needs of your site
- SEO Smart Links - provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more
- Editorial Calendar - makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog and when content will be published
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin - returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display
Widgets
One beautiful aspect of WordPress, which powers Sherpa Sites, is that it allows site administrators to customize the look and functionality using widgets. Here are some of the widgets that you would have access to with your Sherpa Site:
- Archives – a monthly archive of your site’s posts
- Calendar – a calendar of your site’s posts
- Categories – a list or dropdown of your site’s categories
- Custom menu – adds one of your custom menus as a widget
- eNews and Updates – displays Feedburner email subscription form
- Featured Page – displays featured page with thumbnails
- Featured Posts – displays featured posts with thumbnails
- Latest Tweets – displays a list of your latest tweets
- User Profile – displays your user profile block with Gravatar
- Links – displays your blogroll
- Meta – login, logout, admin, feed, and powered-by links
- Pages – displays a list of your site’s pages
- Product Categories - a list or dropdown of product categories from your MarketPress store
- Product List - a customizable list of products from your MarketPress stor
- Product Tag Cloud - most used product tags in cloud format from your MarketPress store
- Recent Comments – displays the most recent blog comments
- Recent Custom Posts – displays the most recent posts for custom post templates (trail reports, gear reviews, etc.)
- Recent Posts – displays the most recent blog posts
- RSS – displays entries from any specified RSS or Atom feed
- Search – a search form for your site
- Shopping Cart - shows dynamic shopping cart contents along with a checkout button for your MarketPress store
- Tag Cloud – displays most used tags in cloud format
- Text – allows you to display arbitrary text or HTML
Other widgets may be made available based on the plugins that you choose to activate on your site. The list of widgets above is very powerful and most provide functional flexibility by altering the settings. Compare Sherpa Sites to other blogging platforms or learn how to choose the level that is right for you.
